


What Happens In Space Vegas

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty
Genre: M/M, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Robots, Stanchez Summer Sizzle, for the salad - tropes prompt, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 23:56:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11679744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Stan just wanted to have a nice, relaxing, ordinary (well, okay, mostly ordinary) vacation with his...with Rick. He really should've known that the 'with Rick' part was going to cancel out the 'nice', the 'relaxing', and especially the 'ordinary'.Still, even if he had, there's probably no way he could've been prepared for waking up inside a robot.





	What Happens In Space Vegas

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Stanchez Summer Sizzle prompt Salad - Tropes; I saw ‘bodyswap’ in the suggested tropes and thought ‘yes’ and then realised that, for these two shows, there was no way I could play it straight. So here is...whatever this is. Warning for body horror and some mild dubcon implications.

The world jumps, abruptly, to the right.

The zip and zing of laser fire reaches Stan’s ears slowly, like it’s filtering down through several fathoms of water. He feels...strange. Not  _bad_. He doesn’t hurt. Actually, it’s strange that he doesn’t hurt. He feels kind of like he should be hurting, right now. 

It’d be nice if he could remember why.

He lets out a groan, and raises a hand to his head anyway. There’s an absence of headache throbbing there, and the pressure of his hand against his forehead doesn’t help. Stan still doesn’t hurt - even his creaky old joints are moving too smoothly, too easily - but his fingertips prickle when he presses them against his skin, too sensitive and yet strangely muffled, like he’s running a fever. He knows that what he's touching is warm (but not outside of ordinary human body temperature), has the give and texture of human skin, in the same way that he knows there's a pressure against his forehead, five points of heat where his fingers are resting, but he isn't...feeling it. Exactly. 

Stan lets out another groan, for good measure. Trying to think about it is making his brain hurt. (But not his head. That's still eerily headache-less.)

A hand (human, bones close to the surface, slightly below average human body temperature, pulse and sweat production slightly above average) wraps around his wrist, jerks it down and shoves something into his hands. Stan’s fingers close around it reflexively, his right hand finding what feels like a trigger. He tries opening his eyes to get a look and see if what’s in his hands is actually what he thinks it is, but the absolute dark stays exactly the same.

“Uh -” he starts, and Rick’s voice, from somewhere to his right, interrupts him.

“You shoot, I’ll try to put your _rrrurrpp_  guts back in. Sound good?”

“Wait, what?” Stan says.

Sure, yeah, he feels weird, but not in-agonising-pain-because-his-guts-are-spilling-all-over-the-place weird. He guesses it’d explain why he feels like he should be in pain right now. But how’d his guts get outside his body in the first place? And - 

“Hey, not that it matters, but who’s shooting at us this time?” he asks, as laser bolts scream past overhead. 

“Your - your - your  _intestines_ , Pines! You want ‘em inside your torso? Then shut the fuck up and get shooting!”

Stan blinks. It doesn’t change anything. 

Maybe he’s just blindfolded, or something, though why anybody would bother blindfolding him without tying him up, he has no idea, but it has to be,  _has_  to be, he can’t be, be  _blind_  - 

There’s a squelching sound that Stan figures he’d rather not ask about, and Rick says, “Here, hold this.”

“Hold what?" Stan snaps. “I can’t fuckin’ see!”

“Oh, yeah,” Rick says, like it’s just occurring to him. “Think you’ve got - got - infrared or something in there.”

“In  _where_?”

Rick doesn’t answer. The squelching’s louder now. Stan kind of wishes he could see what Rick’s doing. It can’t be worse than what he’s imagining. Right?

“Rick, what the hell _-”_

Stan doesn’t get to finish his sentence. He gets cut off by the shriek of a laser bolt as it sizzles past, close enough that Stan can feel the heat of it on his face. That feels weird too, somehow, but he doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Stan’s hands tighten on the gun, and he pushes himself up from the floor he’s slumped on, spinning to fire off two quick shots in the direction the laser bolt had come from before dropping back down again. 

He realises, as he presses his back flat against whatever he'd been leaning against when he'd...woken up? Had he been asleep? Whatever he'd been leaning against, anyway - that the sudden, quick motion hasn't left him out of breath like he'd half-expected. Actually, Stan's not breathing hard at all. He's not - 

He's not breathing.

The jolt of panic that stabs through Stan at the realisation should really make his heart seize in his chest, make it kick into a pounding, fevered pace that makes him worry that a lifetime of bad gas-station food is about to catch up with him - but that doesn't happen either. Stan's not breathing, and his heart's not beating either. 

Well, hot Belgian waffles.

"Sweet shitting  _fuck_!" Stan shouts, quickly lowering his voice again when another burst of laser fire sears the air above his head. "You actually got me fuckin' killed this time!"

There's a snarl in Rick's voice. "Oh, oh sure, just - just make this my fault -"

"It  _is_  your fault!" Stan explodes. "The only people that got beef with me don't use laser guns!”

“Plasma rifles.”

“Plasma - I can't see and I'm not  _breathing_  and some assholes are taking potshots at us and according to you, my intestines are all over the floor! Who gives a shit what they call their laser guns! What the  _fuck_  is going on?"

“You got shot by the intergalactic cops,” Rick says, entirely too composed for somebody who claims to be stuffing the intestines of the man he’s fucking back into said man’s body. “I - I - I stuck you in the nearest robot so you could  _cover for me_  while I put your body back together.”

Another laser bolt sizzles through the air beside Stan.

“You stuck me in the nearest robot,” he manages, flat.

"Did - did you miss the part where - where the whole point of that was keeping me from getting shot?"

"You couldn't just portal us somewhere safe or something," Stan says. His voice still sounds flat. 

There's annoyance creeping into Rick's voice, and Stan could almost laugh, if it weren't for the fact that he's probably dying on some grimy space station floor or something right now. "I could, if - if  _somebody_  hadn't gone and got himself shot. Try putting you through a portal like this and you'll end up wearing your guts as garters. I - I mean it literally. And not - not the colloquial use of 'literally' where you - you just throw it around to make your statements sound more hyperbolic -"

"Yeah, got it," Stan interrupts. "Guts everywhere. Bad idea. So, obviously, the next best thing was to put me in a robot."

Someone in the direction the laser fire's been coming from yells, "We're prepared to accept your surrender! Come out now and we'll make sure the judge who sentences you will go easy on you!" Stan reaches over the - low wall? Upturned table? - he's been leaning against and fires off a couple of shots in their general direction, just on principle. This feeling-but-not-feeling thing is really starting to piss him off. Fuck. Rick really, really better be able to stitch his body up.

"That why I'm blind?" he asks, and flexes his fingers around the gun he's holding (unobtanium alloy and squeevil hide grip, worn, well-used, most recently held by an Earth-D42 human whose perspiration and pheromone production indicate fear). "And got...sensors." 

"And infrared," Rick says.

"Yeah, real helpful," Stan snaps back. "You got any idea how I can turn that on?"

"How - how should I know? I'm not the one who's a robot."

"Hey, are you guys surrendering or what?" the voice from the direction all the laser fire's been coming from calls, and Stan fires off another halfhearted blast in its general direction. "Okay, but I've got a two-o'clock tee time, and I'm gonna be really pissed off if you guys make me miss it!"

"What a - what a shleeb, am I right?" Rick mutters.

"You know, sometimes I think you just make words up to fuck with me," Stan says, feeling at his own face for some kind of switch or something that might turn on the infrared Rick says he's supposed to have. He can't find anything. It's kind of surprising, now, knowing he's in a robot, just how human the thing feels. Apart from the curved strip of cold glass that wraps around his face right over where his eyes should be, and the fact that these damn sensors are telling him that the 'skin' he's touching is actually a silicone overlay, he could almost be a real person.

"How the hell'd you get your hands on a humanoid 'bot, anyway?" Stan asks, not really listening to his own question. 

Rick doesn't answer.

"Rick?" Stan asks, suddenly nervous. He's forcibly reminded that, oh yeah, his body is currently lying on a dirty spaceport floor with its guts around its knees and only Rick's dubious grasp of normal human anatomy between him and a lifetime of reading the chemical composition of everything he touches through his fingers. 

What he can’t figure out is how they ended up in this situation in the first place. There’s no reason the cops should’ve come after them. It’s not like they were doing anything all that illegal - that he can remember, anyway. Far as Stan can think, they were just doing the tourist thing. Sightseeing. Drinking. A little gambling, at an actual, licensed, official casino for once, and Stan hadn’t even understood the games well enough to cheat at them. Turns out aliens are weird. Who woulda figured.

Maybe Rick had been cheating, but still, that doesn’t explain the cops. Maybe it’s different in space, but Stan’s pretty sure most casinos would still rather take out their own trash. Which means - 

“Is this more of your tragic backstory baloney?” he asks, turning in the general direction Rick’s voice has been coming from. “Because if your stupid hangup about dipping sauce or something gets me killed -”

“Way to run a - a minor but amusing character trait into the ground until it - it - it stops being funny and overwhelms every other aspect of my personality,” Rick snaps. “Do you hear  _me_  constantly bringing up your pug-smuggling?”

“All right, sheesh, you don’t gotta make a federal case outta it,” Stan grumbles, adding a muttered, “Touchy,” under his breath.

From the other end of the...hall? Street?...the now-familiar voice calls, too eager, “Did I hear someone mention a federal pug-smuggling case? That might just be enough for me to get a special ops team down here!”

Stan doesn’t need to see the look Rick’s giving him. He can imagine it easy enough.

“Hey,  _you_  brought the pug thing up,” Stan says, firing a few more bolts in the direction of the cops. It’s getting easier, though this whole sensor thing is still just too weird. His hearing’s a lot better than he can remember it ever having been, though, even before the hearing aids, and his hands haven’t been this steady since before he got kicked out. Heck, even the stink of this place (a lot of rubber and latex, and machine oil, and leather, with a hint of stale, recycled spaceport air and, for some reason, cinnamon) seems sharp and clear. Maybe this robot business isn’t the absolute worst.

There’s gotta be a way to turn on this stupid infrared so he can actually sort of see, though. There’s no switch on the outside, as far as Stan can tell, which means he’s going to have to figure out what makes this robot tick on the inside. Great. Since mechanical genius has always been his thing.

“What kind of robot is this, anyway?” he asks, smiling grimly when one of his shots is finally answered by a strangled scream. He really is getting better at this.

Rick doesn’t answer, again, and the buzz of victory fades fast.

“What is this, the silent treatment?” Stan asks, and Rick makes a noise that’s downright indescribable. Or maybe that sound’s coming from Stan’s ruptured body. Hard to tell.

“Of course not, I’m not a  _teenage girl_ ,” Rick sneers, and Stan fires off a couple more shots thoughtfully, listening hard for more screams.

“Yeah, maybe if you were you’d be more emotionally mature.” A short, sharp shriek from the cops’ side of things, and Stan lets out a whoop. “Seriously, I’m pretty sure Mabel’s better at dating than you, and I once saw her pick up a girl by saying, ‘Hi! I’m Mabel and I have a pig! You can pet him if you come get coffee with me!’”

“I’m a fantastic date,” Rick grumbles.

“You got me shot on an alien planet.”

“Exactly. Who else is taking you to such glam _uuurrrrp_ ous and - and exciting places?”

Stan doesn’t really have a comeback to that one, so he focuses on trying to turn on his infrared instead. There’s a whirring noise, and something starts blasting shitty dance music, a heavy thud of bass like an artificial heartbeat pounding from a speaker embedded in Stan’s chest. 

The zip and zing of laser bolts around him suddenly intensifies, like he’s just painted a giant target on his back. Stan concentrates, and the music snaps off again as soon as humanly - well, robotically - possible. One last shot still kicks sparks up off his shoulder, his sensors registering torn silicone without any pain and dispatching nanobots to patch it.  _Shit_ , that feels weird.

“What. The hell,” Stan says, in the ringing silence.

He’s pretty sure that it’s not just his imagination that the silence coming from Rick’s direction has taken on a slight embarrassed tinge.

“Sounds like you guys are having a real party over there!” the irritatingly enthusiastic cop calls. “Hope you don’t mind if we crash it!”

“ _Rick_ ,” Stan demands. “Are my guts back in me or what?”

“I’m  _working_  on it! I’d’ve been done twenty minutes ago if your - your digestive system was a diflurbian convertor box!” He manages to make it sound accusing, like it’s Stan’s fault his internal organs aren’t a - whatever Rick just said.

“Shit,” Stan mutters. There’s entirely too much rumbling coming from the other end of the...room, for lack of a better word, and he stabs wildly for something else, hoping blindly that if it’s not the damn infrared, it’s at least a giant plasma arm cannon or something.

Where the hell did Rick even find a humanoid robot with infrared and such sensitive sensory input -  _and_  a built-in  _sound system_? Who built something like that? And who went to so much trouble to make it look and feel so human, other than hiding its eyes -

“Wait,” Stan says, a horrible suspicion seizing him. “We left the casino. Where are we right now?”

“Outside the casino,” Rick answers, unhelpfully.

“I  _know_  we’re outside the casino,” Stan presses on, wishing he could stop or get off this train of thought before it arrives at its horrible, inevitable destination. “Because we were both pretty drunk, and  _somebody_  forgot a certain...adult vitamin supplement, that I need, for reasons -”

“You’re a geezer, just - just admit you need pharmaceutical help to get it up already,” Rick complains.

“Only when I’m drunk!” Stan snaps back, a little too fast. “Which is normal. Could happen to anybody, any age.”

“Sure, keep - keep telling yourself that.”

“You’re just trying to piss me off so I get distracted, aren’t you,” Stan says. 

“Is it working?”

“Because,” Stan pushes on, stubbornly, determined now to reach that awful conclusion he knows he isn’t going to like, “you don’t want me to remember that you said you knew a guy who could take care of our - my - little  _issue_  and -”

Stan stops. He really, really wishes he could draw in a deep breath, or pinch the bridge of his nose, or something. He settles for slapping a hand flat against his face and slowly dragging it down, the silicone of his palm squeaking loudly against the cool glass band over where his eyes should be.

“Rick,” he says, using his best ‘I’m-not-mad-I’m-just-asking-so-I-know-what-I’m-about-to-be-mad-about’ voice, honed on both the kids at the Shack and on Ford, who can be a big oversized kid himself half the time, “did you stick my brain in a sex robot?”

“ _No_ ,” Rick says, sounding so affronted that for half a second Stan almost tries to heave a sigh of relief. “Your brain’s still in your body with the - the rest of your organs. Except some of your intestines.” He says it offhand, like Stan’d dropped a handful of change rather than a major part of his insides. “I stuck your consciousness in a sex robot.”

Stan doesn’t move for a long, long second.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he says, finally, conversationally.

There’s a rumble from the far end of the room that Stan can feel coming up through the soles of his feet and his knees where he’s crouched on the floor (brushed concrete, very industrial, rough on the silicone). 

“No you’re not, then you’d be stuck in the sex robot indefinitely,” Rick says, equally conversationally. “There. That should - should hold you through at least one portal.”

He wraps a hand around Stan’s wrist (warm, heart rate and body temperature elevated slightly above average for an adult human male, pheromones - pheromones indicating the first traces of arousal, and damn if that isn’t doing something weird to Stan’s robot innards that he’d really rather not think about right now) and yanks, pulling Stan forward. “Help me move you.”

Stan’s (hopefully temporary) robot hands find his own, human torso (body temperature too low, sensors indicating blood loss, dangerous but survivable with appropriate transfusions) and he hoists...himself...up over one shoulder, pushing himself to his feet. There’s the wet sizzle and sudden waft of ozone and burnt limes that mean Rick’s just opened a portal. Rick yells, “So long, suckers!” over the rumble from the other end of the room, which builds until it drowns him out, until it’s almost deafening, feedback whining in Stan’s ears and splintering into random strands of data.

Rick’s hand on Stan’s wrist tugs Stan through the portal, and

...

 

...

“Whoa,” Stan says, trying and failing to sit up. His whole body from the neck down is just a ball of agony, but at least it’s good, honest pain. And he’s never been so grateful to see so many colours. He just hopes they belong to some kind of alien hospital and not, say, a cop shop, though the soothing pastels and the smell of piss, overcooked food, and industrial disinfectant seem to bode well for that. Some things are universal, apparently. “Ow.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna - that’s gonna hurt for a while,” Rick says, from somewhere to Stan’s right. 

“What happened?” Stan asks, carefully. It hurts to talk. His right hand is warm, and slightly damp, and just a little sore, like somebody’d been holding it too tight until very recently.

“Sensors on the robot went all haywire coming through the portal. Too sensitive. Apparently they ‘aren’t meant to be used for unregulated interdimensional travel’ and I’m ‘not getting the damage deposit back’.” Stan manages to turn his head just in time to see Rick shrug one shoulder, like he isn’t bothered by any of it. “It - it fried pretty spectacularly. Fireworks everywhere. Too bad you were in it, you missed the - the show.”

“Too bad,” Stan echoes, feeling stupid with surprise and pain. “My guts still out?”

“Nnnnope,” Rick says, proud, popping the ‘p’. “All - all stitched up and healing. It’ll hurt like a bitch for a while, though.”

Stan gives a little huff of acknowledgement. That hurts too.

"It's official, this is the worst vacation I've ever been on,” he says. “And I'm countin' the time I got Vegas-married to a prospector statue."

Rick gives another nonchalant shrug. “Can’t say we - we never do anything interesting.”

Stan snorts laughter, gasps in a silent breath when it laces a line of silver pain through his side.

He considers the lines of fire striping his stomach, the memory of the twist in his robot insides when Rick had grabbed his wrist back there, the warmth that’s quickly fading from his right hand.

“You got another one of those robots kicking around?” he asks, and Rick’s grin turns wicked.

“Why, you - you wanna take it for a spin?”

Stan tries to shrug, regrets it. “Hey, what’s the worst that could happen? Don’t answer that.”

Rick just smiles, long and lazy and triumphant. "Well, you know what they say about what happens on Vega."

"I'm pretty sure that's 'in Vegas'," Stan corrects him.

"Oh, oh right, because the - the universe revolves around the Earth. Any other fourteenth-century scientific breakthroughs you'd like to share?"

Stan just shakes his head the best he can, before shutting his eyes and settling back into his pillow. 


End file.
